Is White Sugar Always Bad for Your Health?

In my opinion, no, although I hasten to add that hundreds of millions of people consume entirely too much white sugar for good health. White sugar has several commendable qualities. It is a quick energy source, one of the most practical home treatments for treating emergencies in hypoglycemia and over-medication of diabetes.

White sugar is a relatively pure food. The liver does not have to detoxify it. White sugar does not rob the body of nutrients it has already absorbed, although eating high-sugar foods to the exclusion of other nourishing foods can (less often than one might think) result in nutritional deficiency. And if sugar’s effects are bad, they are at least highly predictable.

Despite the popularity of low-carb diets, the per capita consumption of sugar in the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand still hovers around 100 pounds (45 kg) per year. Some of the recipes for desserts in this book incorporate sugar, but only about 10 percent as much as the average person eats in a day, and I do not recommend anyone eat even this amount every day.

I am much less sanguine about high-fructose corn syrup. I am inclined to make an exception for high-fructose corn syrup to my rule that there are no junk foods. Even with high-fructose corn syrup, however, to me the question is too much sugar, too much carbohydrate, or just too much? The commercial production of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) began in 1967, at which time the fructose content of the syrup was about 15 percent.

Further research enabled the industry to develop a higher-conversion HFCS that had a fructose content of 42 percent. After a few more modifications, an HFCS with a fructose content of 55 percent became the sweetener of choice for the soft drink and ice cream industries, and an HFCS with a fructose content of 90 percent became a frequent choice for use in "natural" and "light" foods. When an essential ingredient in “light” foods is 90 percent sugar, maybe it is not too hard to figure out why more and more people are obese.

Interestingly, sugar seems to play a much less menacing role in British and European diets than in America. Most of the sugar consumed in Europe is made from sugarbeets. Herbal researchers in France report that betaine, a natural constituent of sugarbeets has a fat-reducing and antitoxic function by acting on the methylation cycle in the liver.

Betaine from beet sugar helps the liver detoxify heavy metals such as arsenic, and it helps the liver reprocess dopamine, epinephrine, estrogen, histamine, and progesterone. It promotes the regeneration of liver cells. It helps the liver make triglycerides to supply the muscles with energy. Betaine even helps the body preserve its natural SAM-e and indirectly lowers homocysteine.

And in my experience in Europe, most people receive a more than adequate daily dosage of betaine from beet sugar! One German company (which, I should disclose, provided substantial funding for the American Botanical Council when I worked for them in 1995 and 1996), Willmar Schwabe Arzneimittel, has even made a nutritional supplement based on beet sugar.